eHarmony Sings a New Tune, Part 2

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
by Ian Ayres

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While all three services crunch numbers to make their compatibility predictions, their results are markedly different. eHarmony believes in finding people who are a lot like you. "What our research kept saying," Warren has observed, "is [to] find somebody whose intelligence is a lot like yours, whose ambition is a lot like yours, whose energy is a lot like yours, whose spirituality is a lot like yours, whose curiosity is a lot like yours. It was a similarity model."

Perfectmatch and True.com in contrast look for complementary personalities. "We all know, not just in our heart of hearts, but in our experience, that sometimes we're attracted [to], indeed get along better with, somebody different from us," says Pepper Schwartz, the empiricist behind Perfectmatch. "So the nice thing about the Myers-Briggs was it's not just characteristics, but how they fit together."

This disagreement over results isn't the way data-driven decision making is supposed to work. The data should be able to adjudicate whether similar or complementary people make better matches. It's hard to tell who's right, because the industry keeps its analysis and the data on which the analysis is based a tightly held secret. Unlike the data from a bunch of my studies (on taxicab tipping, affirmative action, and concealed handguns) that anyone can freely download from the Internet, the data behind the matching rules at the Internet dating services are proprietary.

Mark Thompson, who developed Yahoo! Personals, says it's impractical to apply social science standards to the market. "The peer-review system is not going to apply here," Thompson says. "We had two months to develop the system for Yahoo! We literally worked around the clock. We did studies on 50,000 people."

The matching sites, meanwhile, are starting to compete on validating their claims. True.com emphasizes that it is the only site which had its methodology certified by an independent auditor. True.com's chief psychologist James Houran is particularly dismissive of eHarmony's data claims. "I've seen no evidence they even conducted any study that forms the basis of their test," Houran says. "If you're touting that you're doing something scientific . . . you inform the academic community."

eHarmony is responding by providing some evidence that their matching system works. It sponsored a Harris poll suggesting that eHarmony is now producing about ninety marriages a day (that's over 30,000 a year). This is better than nothing, but it's only a modest success because with more than five million members, these marriages represent about only a 1 percent chance that your $50 fee will produce a walk down the aisle. The competitors are quick to dismiss the marriage number. Yahoo!'s Thompson has said you have a better chance of finding your future spouse if you "go hang out at the Safeway."

eHarmony also claims that it has evidence that its married couples are in fact more compatible. Its researchers presented last year to the American Psychological Society their finding that married couples who found each other through eHarmony were significantly happier than couples married for a similar length of time who met by other means. There are some serious weaknesses with this study, but the big news for me is that the major matching sites are not just Super Crunching to develop their algorithms; they're Super Crunching to prove that their algorithms got it right.

The matching algorithms of these services aren't, however, completely data-driven. All the services rely at least partially on the conscious preferences of their clients (regardless of whether these preferences are valid predictors of compatibility). eHarmony allows clients to discriminate on the race of potential mates. Even though it's only acting on the wishes of its clients, matching services that discriminate by race may violate a statute dating back to the Civil War that prohibits race discrimination in contracting. Think about it. eHarmony is a for-profit company that takes $50 from black clients and refuses to treat them the same (match them with the same people) as some white clients. A restaurant would be in a lot of trouble if it refused to seat Hispanic customers in a section where customers had stated a preference to have "Anglos only."

eHarmony has gotten into even more trouble for its refusal to match same sex couples. The founder's wife and senior vice president, Marylyn Warren, has claimed that "eHarmony is meant for everybody. We do not discriminate in any way." This is clearly false. They would refuse to match two men even if, based on their answers to the company's 436 questions, the computer algorithm picked them to be the most compatible. There's a sad irony here. eHarmony, unlike its competitors, insists that similar people are the best matches. When it comes to gender, it insists that opposites attract. Out of the top ten matching sites, eHarmony is the only one that doesn't offer same-sex matching.

Why is eHarmony so out of step? Its refusal to match gay and lesbian clients, even in Massachusetts where same-sex marriage is legal, seems counter to the company's professed goal of helping people find lasting and satisfying marriage partners. Warren is a self-described "passionate Christian" who for years worked closely with James Dobson's Focus on the Family. eHarmony is only willing to facilitate certain types of legal marriages regardless of what the statistical algorithm says. In fact, because the algorithm is not public, it is possible that eHarmony puts a normative finger on the scale to favor certain clients.

Copyright © 2007 by Ian Ayres

About the Author

Ian Ayres ,an econometrician and lawyer, is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School, and a professor at Yale's School of Management. He is a regular commentator on public radio's Marketplace and a columnist for Forbes magazine. He is currently the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, and has written eight books and more than a hundred articles.